Two Senses of Gender Abolition: Gender as Accumulation Strategy

What contribution does the struggle for trans liberation have for a communist horizon? Posing this question raises the vexed relationship between class struggle and so-called identity politics. This chapter aims to understand the totalizing force of political movement from one or another standpoint of social identity. Georg Lukács introduced “standpoint” as a category to think the differential perspectives onto capitalist totality that class positions enable. In a Lukácsian attempt to account for the capitalist production of sexual identity, Kevin Floyd has argued that this production of identity—a reification in the sense of the solidification of a stable position out of a historical process—enables a historically situated and critical knowledge of capitalist totality. This chapter pursues an analogous argument from a transsexual perspective. The aim is to foreground the sphere of embodiment that transsexuality bears on—where “embodiment” signals the social dimension of signification that any body partakes in.